Rui Pinto, the Portuguese computer specialist who founded the Football Leaks website, remains a polarising figure in world football for publishing millions of confidential documents that exposed the sport’s financial underbelly.
The 37-year-old’s leaks, which began in 2015, included internal emails and contracts involving major clubs and stars. Material linked to Manchester City later formed part of the background to the Premier League’s financial charges against the club, which the club has denied.
Pinto has described his aim as exposing “the hidden side of football.” He shared more than three terabytes of data with journalists at the German magazine Der Spiegel and the European Investigative Collaborations consortium.
His former geography teacher, Mario Falcao, remembered him as an ordinary pupil with a talent for computers. “Rui was a perfectly normal pupil.
He was nice, with his spiky hair, he was quite sociable but not extrovert,” Falcao said. “Certainly he was very good in computers.”
Portuguese journalist Antonio Varela, the first contacted by Pinto under the pseudonym “John,” recalled the impact of the early leaks. “We realised that [Football Leaks] got the information illegally.
But since the moment they publish the information on the site, that’s public information,” Varela said.
“You can’t ignore that. Ethically, it’s complicated, but the public interest is more relevant than the ethical issue.”
Der Spiegel data journalist Christoph Winterbach, who worked on the files, described the initial reaction. “In the beginning it was very much a fascinating feeling of like a child in a candy store,” he said. He later called Pinto “one of the most important whistleblowers that we have in Europe or maybe the world.”
Opinions on Pinto remain sharply split. Former Portuguese diplomat Ana Gomes has defended him as a whistleblower. “What he has exposed is very important. In Portugal, definitely he is by far the most important whistleblower,” she said.
Others take a harder line. Lawyer Rui Patricio, representing Benfica, told a court: “He’s a hacker, period, just like that. What he did is not allowed – it’s a crime and there are no excuses.”
Pinto was arrested in Hungary in 2019 and extradited to Portugal. He later received a four-year suspended sentence in Portugal and a six-month suspended sentence in France. He has lived under witness protection while monitoring the ongoing Manchester City case.
His lawyer, Francisco Teixeira da Mota, said the outcome of that case mattered to his client. “It would be important for him to feel vindicated that it was useful, that something happened,” he said.
